ARAD. - A city in western Romania, capital of the province of the same name in Transylvania. It enters history as early as the 11th century, and at the end of the 12th it became the seat of a Catholic bishopric. In 1705 Isaia Diaconovici established there the dissident bishopric, but in 1713 Bishop Ivanichie Martinovici adhered to Rome and, from 1720, under Bishop Sofronie Ravanovici, conversions made ever greater progress until the bishopric of Nistor Ivanovici (1829-30).
At the beginning of the 20th century A. was the cultural and national centre of the Transylvanian Romanians; there the Romanian National Council prepared the historic assembly of Alba Julia (1 Dec. 1918) for the union of Transylvania with the mother country.
The city has churches for the various rites, a dissident and a Lutheran bishopric, a Latin-Catholic vicariate and a Greek-Catholic archpriesthood, as well as a house of Minorites, the seat of the provincial of the Order for Transylvania.